If you've been designing websites for awhile then you probably remember this: . I wrote a lot of websites like that before CSS arrived, but when I tried to remember how backgrounds worked back then, I honestly had to look it up-it looks completely alien now. There's little chance that you're still using HTML like that (although there are still some old school tutorials floating around out there); but a lot of web designers have never taken the time to really explore and understand the background property in CSS. In this article, I'm going to give a quick rundown of how to use the background property effectively and eliminate all the background-position, background-color, and other redundant properties.